


people should see how we're living

by seventhswan



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Winter Soldier, Spoilers, Trauma Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-20 01:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1490926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhswan/pseuds/seventhswan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a stray cat one spring when Steve was a kid, gray and spindly, matted. She used to look at him with these huge eyes, like she was waiting for his fist to close around her neck, like she knew it was shameful weakness letting him this close to her, but she just couldn’t stand to be alone any more. Bucky makes that same face.</p>
<p>Or: Bucky Barnes is a work in progress. Luckily, Steve’s a hard worker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	people should see how we're living

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t _think_ there’s anything in here that requires a specific warning – although this deals with Bucky’s recovery, it doesn’t go into detail and the whole story is extremely gentle. If I’ve missed something that should be flagged up, please let me know. Additionally, I hope this is mistake-free, but please let me know if you catch something!
> 
> Title from Lorde’s **Buzzcut Season**.

It’s unbelievably difficult in the beginning. Saying Bucky is like a feral animal feels too glib, but it’s the only real point of reference Steve has – there was a stray cat one spring when he was a kid, gray and spindly, matted, that slunk around the neighborhood. He squirreled away what he could from the table (though there wasn’t much, not more than crumbs), and even then it took six weeks before she’d bear his hand on her back. She used to look at him with these huge eyes, like she was waiting for his fist to close around her neck, like she knew it was shameful weakness letting him this close to her, but she just couldn’t stand to be alone any more.

Bucky met her, actually. She used to sit on the sill while Steve sketched the skyline, flicking her tail and looking studiously bored, as though she was there under duress, and she wanted everyone to know she had other, better things she could be doing.

Bucky makes that same face – that face of _experience has taught me I’ll regret this_ \- when Steve comes close, says in the kindest voice he can manage, _Buck, hey, Buck – c’mere, take a look at this_. He keeps doing it, slow and patient, because he can see what’s underneath, poorly concealed - _please don’t leave me, though I am weak_.

|

The decimation of SHIELD means there’s nobody to tell Steve that Bucky can’t carry out his convalescence at home with him. Of course, Tony could balk at the idea of having Bucky at the tower, but he doesn’t. Mostly.

“Mi casa es su casa,” he says when Steve comes into the workshop and asks, feeling stupid. “Really, what’s another person who could creep into my room at night and kill me a good ten times over before I could open my mouth to scream?”

A reluctant smile pulls up the corner of Steve’s mouth, though he can see plainly the tic of concern in Tony’s cheek. Teams are funny things. Once upon a time he couldn’t even tell when Tony was being sarcastic and when he was sincere, which is unthinkable now.

“Buck’s not really – not like Natasha, though,” Steve says, uncertainly. He wishes he could pick up something off Tony’s bench and turn it over in his hands for something to look at, but only ruin lies that way. Instead, he says it while squinting over at the bot charging stations. The thing is, Natasha is deadly and has a tendency to sharpen her knives at the breakfast table, sure, but she’s not – she’s never been… Not like Buck. She hasn’t ever been destroyed quite that way, and built back up wrong. Natasha is brilliant, and composed – she’s a revolver, but Buck’s a machine gun, really, as far as the others are aware. It's the only way they've ever known him.

Tony raises an eyebrow.

“We deal with the big green guy, we can deal with the one-armed bandit,” he says easily. He’s already picked up some screws and slotted them between his teeth, like he does when he’s thinking. The concerned tic’s gone.

“Thanks,” Steve says finally, in lieu of anything else. He feels oddly embarrassed, but Tony just waves a hand, grinning around the screws.

Tony still starts the first time he sees Bucky at the breakfast table, sat stiffly in the clothes Sam and Natasha got for him as though they itch, a cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal in front of him. Tony’s gaping a little, but then Natasha elbows him sharply in the ribs.

“ _What is wrong with you?_ ” she hisses, barely moving her lips. Tony casts a wide-eyed, possibly guilty look at Steve, who’s frying bacon and chattering nineteen-to-the-dozen to Bucky. It’s just nonsense - stuff about the Tower and Bruce and Pepper and Tony’s robots and the postcard they just got from Clint. Tony and Steve’s eyes meet, but Steve doesn’t stop talking.

“I just don’t know what I expected,” Tony mutters to Natasha, out of the side of his mouth. Bucky, for his part, gives no indication he’s listening to any of them. His attention’s been attracted by the talking coffee machine Tony brought back from Tokyo. A little oatmeal has slopped, forgotten, off his spoon onto the glass surface of the breakfast table.

“To see him masticating a chunk of bloody deer from the carcass he snuck out and killed this morning, I suppose,” Tony whispers finally to Natasha, in a tone he obviously thinks is _sotto voce_ , and pulls out the chair to sit next to her. He’s staring at Bucky despite obviously trying not to. Bucky, for his part, finally notices that he’s making a mess, as though he’s waking from a trance.

“Ah, sorry,” he says, casting about for something to wipe it up with. Steve’s already there at his shoulder, though, smiling and lifting the corner of his apron to the spill.

|

Steve knows that Bucky underwent a lengthy series of psychiatric deprogramming and therapy sessions, that they were “successful”. He doesn’t really know what that means. Bucky is still skittish in the Tower, as though he half-suspects they’re holding him here. Sometimes when Steve is talking to him, his gaze slides away from Steve’s to flick around the room, like he’s checking the exits are still there, still clear. 

Bucky loves (relatively) modern television, it turns out. He’ll spend whole afternoons with Steve in the lounge, just watching cooking shows and hours of Bob Ross that JARVIS streams for them. It’s probably dumb, but Steve wants to keep Bucky to that – stuff with no stakes, and no danger, and no death. Just for now, Steve wants to keep him safe.

“Steve,” Bucky says one night from the sofa, when they’ve been there so long it’s gone dark outside. He’s hugging one of the throw pillows to his chin, and in the low light, he looks so young. His eyes are almost black, and so big. Steve feels a lurch in his gut.

“I’m here, buddy,” Steve says from his armchair, but Bucky doesn’t say anything else.

|

Bucky loves Bruce, too, actually. Apparently he finds Bruce meditating in the lounge one morning before Steve’s awake and just joins in. 

“Do you mind?” Steve asks, a little anxious. Bruce just takes a sip of tea, mouth curved around the lip of the mug, and shrugs.

“Of course not,” he says, and it sounds fond, even. “James is – is good company. Doesn’t say much.”

It’s something Steve’s noticed in all his teammates – that reluctance to call Bucky by the name Steve calls him. Tony resorts to a series of wildly escalating and mostly offensive nicknames, while Natasha doesn’t call him anything at all. Sam only calls him ‘your boy Barnes’ or, to Bucky’s face, ‘big guy’, which makes Steve smile a little.

Natasha inadvertently gives him half an answer about it, maybe a week after the thought first occurs to him.

“You know…” she says, arms crossed, when she runs across him in the corridor outside Bruce’s lab, “he might – Steve, you’re doing great with him, but you know he – he probably won’t ever…”

“He’s getting better all the time,” is all Steve says, mild. Through the glass wall in front of them, Bucky is perched on a stool, listening intently while Bruce explains some aspect of his current research. Steve might have thought being in a scientific lab would unsettle Bucky, but maybe he’s just willing to go wherever Bruce is. There’s something about his careful, quiet voice that just puts Buck under. And Bruce always leaves a couple windows open when he’s in there, too. Clear exits.

Bucky looks up suddenly, as though he can feel Steve’s eyes on him, and smiles, brilliant like the sun coming up. It’s still like a punch to Steve’s solar plexus. He lifts his hand and waves jauntily, feeling like his face will split on his answering beam.

“Of course he is,” Natasha says, voice very soft. She’s looking at Bucky, too. Her hair is curling damply over her shoulders, and she looks tiny in her bare feet. “I’m not saying he’s not getting better, he really is. And he’ll get completely better. I just – he won’t ever be your Bucky. You know that, right? He can’t ever be… the Bucky you lost.”

Steve swallows, wondering just how short her drawn straw must have been for her to get stuck having this conversation.

“I know,” he says, and he feels like he does. Natasha slants a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. He struggles for the right words, looking down at his hands clasped around the metal handrail that bisects the lab window. “It doesn’t – matter to me. If your dog dies and you get a new dog, you don’t expect the new one to bark exactly like the old one did. You just want – you want -”

“Steve –“ Natasha says, and makes this gesture like she’s about to reach out and touch his shoulder, but then aborts it. Steve rubs his temples on the pretext of having a headache, but mostly he’s just hiding his eyes.

“I’m fine, Natasha, I’m fine. There was just – there was this awful _hole_. There was such a hole in me. It doesn’t matter whether he ever gets all his memories back perfectly, there’ll be new ones. This is enough. Any Bucky is enough.”

|

The Tower has a rooftop garden that may be Bucky’s favorite place in the world. Steve thinks sometime, maybe next month, they’ll go all over New York, walk Central Park, get ice-cream, go to Coney Island, maybe. It’s not that Steve doesn’t trust Bucky in public, more like he doesn’t trust himself not to have a heart attack at the idea of losing Bucky in a crowd, at turning around and not seeing Bucky waiting there at his side, no more than a step away.

So, for now, the garden is Bucky’s favorite place. When the weather is fine, the two of them sit up there after dinner, and Bucky messes around in the dirt while Steve sketches. He’s pretty good at it, actually, and dedicated, to the extent that Tony had Pepper speak to the gardener so there’s a stream of supplies and new things to plant, and Bucky maintains it all himself. 

Sometimes Natasha brings her current needlepoint project (the walls in the lounge already bear frames containing her efforts, including a vivid scene of Justin Hammer being chased by wasps and crying, which she did for Tony’s birthday), and sometimes they’re accompanied by Sam when he’s over for dinner, or Bruce, or even Tony for the fifteen minutes before he opines that he always forgets he only likes communing with nature in _theory_.

This evening, though, it’s just the two of them. Buck’s on his knees in the soil, shifting it barehanded as usual. He seems to like feeling the dirt under his fingernails, even though the gardener always leaves a pair of gloves. Steve blocks him out on the paper, in smooth broad strokes – the bow of his back, the fall of his hair against his cheek, the concentration in his body, his careful hands cupping the soil block around a plantling he’s moving. He’s halfway to a decent - if rushed - likeness, when Bucky sits down on the porch swing next to him.

“Let me see,” he says, nodding at the page. Steve grins ruefully and turns it towards him. Bucky snorts.

“I don’t look like that,” he says cheerfully, and Steve laughs. Bucky has shed little particles of dirt all over the seat. It’s so ordinary, so vivid and yet almost hallucinatory, all at once. Steve doesn’t think he would have the imagination to dream the little crumbs of soil, though – it must be real.

“Steve,” Bucky says suddenly, “Steve, do you remember that time we went to the movies with those two dames, and yours had on those shoes that didn’t really fit her, and she hurt her ankle trying to not get sprayed by that cab?”

It’s such an innocuous memory, silly really, but it makes Steve smile in remembrance. She’d been a great girl actually, just hobbled gamely til they could get her home. He remembers linking arms with Bucky behind her back and the three of them lurching down the street, laughing, Bucky’s date giggling beside them and good-naturedly ribbing her friend about ruining her new shoes with the big scuff on the toe.

Steve knows that when Bucky says _do you remember_ these days, what he really means is _that really happened, didn’t it, it’s a real memory?_

“Yeah,” Steve says. His face is starting to hurt where it’s creased with fondness. Bucky relaxes in response, settling further into his seat. “I remember.”

How strange it is, to get back something you thought you’d never have again. How strange to have loved someone so long and still look so young. Sometimes Steve gets a shock, looking at his own face in the mirror.

Beside him, Bucky leans his head back against the cushion, closing his eyes. Steve kicks, once, against the decking, starts them off swinging, just a little. 

“You shouldn’t keep things from me, you know,” Bucky says, as out of the blue as his mention of the memory, and Steve starts.

“Hmm?” he says, playing dumb. He knows it won’t buy him long, and sure enough, Bucky slits open one eye and pins him with a sharp look. Bucky’s been through a lot, but it doesn’t make him stupid or braindead.

“Yeah, I know, Buck,” he says, trying not to sigh. He knows he can’t treat Bucky like an invalid forever, coddle him like this. He doesn’t know how to say _I’m not sure if you’ll let me love you any other way_. He doesn’t have the words for this, for any of it.

Bucky shuts his eyes again, apparently satisfied. After a few seconds, Steve feels Bucky’s hand approaching his, just creeping across the seat. His hand opens up for Bucky’s automatically. Steve’s been opening up for Bucky, over and over, since the day they met, without a thought.

Steve clings on, and watches the sun dip below the horizon, and feels like he can rest for the first time in… in such a long, long time.


End file.
